Automobiles and other vehicles have come to employ safety systems which include radar technologies for detecting a location of an object or target with respect to the vehicle so that a driver or collision-avoidance device can react accordingly. A radar system includes a transmitter for sending out a source signal and a receiver for receiving an echo or reflection of the source signal from the target. The received signal is sampled at a selected sampling frequency and the sampled data points of the received signal are entered into a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in order to determine a frequency of the reflected signal. Various parameters and dimensions of the target, which are determined from the frequency, are then used to represent a target signal representative of the target in a data cube.
Due to the time-limited nature of digital sampling techniques, the target signal in the data cube is not a centralized point but instead displays a central peak with multiple side lobes. The presence of side lobes produces complications when attempting to distinguish multiple target signals from one another. For example, when a first target and a second target are in close proximity of each other, a side lobe of a first target signal (representative of the first target) can overlap a peak of a second target signal (representative of the second target). When the first target is much stronger or more intense that the second target, the side lobe of the first target signal can mask the presence of the second target signal or alter the appearance of the second target signal, thereby making accurate measurement of the second target signal difficult. Accordingly, it is desirable to remove the side lobes related to target signals in order to better distinguish multiple target signals from each other.